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1. Search the forum. You can do this from the Advanced Search Page or from our Google Custom Search, which will search the entire PKP site. If you are encountering an error, we especially recommend searching the forum for said error.

2. Check the FAQ to see if your question or error has already been resolved.

3. Post a question, but please, only after trying the above two solutions. If it's a workflow or usability question you should probably post to the OJS Editorial Support and Discussion subforum; if you have a development question, try the OJS Development subforum.

We've just started up a new OJS journal and are processing our
first few manuscripts. I'm sure we will have several queries about the system over the next few weeks as we get used to it.

The first one which came up and which a quick search of the forums
didn't seem to have an answer for, has to do with e-mails being logged
in the system.

The first issue with this has to do with keeping copies of all correspondence in the system. We have three editors and an off-system e-mail backup archive.
Authors are supposed to post to the system but often send things to the
editors. We'ed like to get this outside mail into the system. Is there
an easy way to do this besides e.g. copying and pasting it into a submission note?

The second issue has to do with copying mail to the off-system archive. Mail from the system currently goes to the editors home e-mail addresses. Can we add a second e-mail address for them so that the mail also goes to the back-up archive? Trying to add a second e-mail with a comma seperator through the edit user profile pane generates an 'improper e-mail' error message.

As you've probably discovered, OJS will log all correspondence sent via the system (if the logging option is enabled) -- but responses to these emails, as they don't interact with OJS, won't be logged. You have two options:

Bring external messages into OJS. This will require code to insert outside messages into the database tables and some manner of collecting the emails.

Gather all correspondence outside of OJS. If you can configure an external email account to which all correspondence should be BCC'd, modifying OJS to automatically CC all messages to this account is trivial (using classes/mail/Mail.inc.php). Then, when you receive outside emails via a traditional email client, they'll either be already CC'd to the journal's account (if the Author, for example, used Reply All) or you'll have to forward it to the journal account manually.

Because you're dealing with multiple email packages (e.g. OJS and Outlook) and multiple users (the editorial team, who can follow journal policies, and external users like authors and reviewers, who likely won't in a reliable manner), this will be a difficult problem to solve.

A third option would be to work at the mail server level -- if everyone on the editorial team can get an account specific to the journal, you may be able to configure the mail server to archive all sent and received emails at that point. This becomes more of a privacy issue.

In general, we've tried to encourage users to use the OJS facilities whenever possible -- first, the workflow and editing processes that are built in, and second, the generic email icons as a fallback. Outside users such as Authors and Reviewers are difficult to predict, however, as they generally interact with the system very rarely and have various levels of experience with web-based systems.

If you find that users only occasionally step outside of the built-in OJS functions, which are logged properly, it might be easiest to use the Editor's "History" page for a submission to record interactions informally via notes.